Comfort Measures Only by Rafael Campo; Duke University Press, $22.95
As an Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, decorated Cuban author and poet Rafael Campo beautifully channels his experiences as a physician and medical instructor into prose that has become well-known and duly awarded. His new collection "Comfort Measures Only" gathers 88 poems, many of which are new and unpublished, with the remainder drawn from other books of his works.
His distinguished career as a writer and aptly named "poet-physician" spans more than two decades and is wonderfully represented here in this streamlined new volume that focuses on the writer's gay life and clinical career.
"Illness may be a muse, but it is a particularly vexing one," Campo writes in the book's illuminative introduction about how he channels subject matter closest to his heart and mind, when so much sickness, misery, pain, distress, and disease can prove depressing to both the reader and the author. Despite this, he describes his grandmother's last days and the love he had for her in eloquent paragraphs.
The antiseptic, steely gray tones of hospital emergency rooms are the setting for a lot of this work, but the compassionate heart and soul with which these poems are written cuts through the melancholy and sorrow. There is a spectral light hidden within each of Campo's poems, but not every reader will recognize it.
In the title poem, Campo reflects on the process of dying, and how, for some, the eventuality of death is delayed, prolonging the sadness. The title refers to universal hospice direction whereby patients, with death lingering at the threshold, are given no invasive or painful medical procedures, only palliative compassionate care, with caregivers awaiting the dying to "give in to the invidious assault."
Other pieces concern the pain, desolation, and confusion of AIDS, piercingly described as adorned with "the slippers made of Kaposi's/ The gown of night and soaking sweats," the "silvery and cold" specter of the speculum during a pelvic exam, the "timeless, dizzy, unscrupulous/ dimly lit" aspects of the human mind, the "smart perfume" of antiseptics, and the many nuances of a shift at an HIV clinic.
A section of new poetry closes out the book, artfully representing Campo's maturing narrative voice and increasing poetic dexterity through gorgeous stanzas and emotive wordplay. The final poem gives voice to a doctor's stethoscope as it describes the experience of being pressed to a chest or a back to hear the "scratching of the tiny crab/ too many years of smoking left behind."
Fans of Campo's work will find much to savor in this treasury from a physician with his heart in all the right places.